In the prior art, retail industry decision-making is becoming more sophisticated in nature, relying upon scientific methodologies and quantitative measures. Site selection is one of the most crucial decisions made in the retail chain (including especially restaurants) environment as it is capital intensive, has serious long term marketing implications, and is critical to corporate-franchisee relations. While there are a number of site selection tools in the prior art, the presently available tools forecast sales based on the sales of existing sites, and do not explicitly incorporate the effect of advertising into the site selection process. The problem with this approach is locating a new site in an area populated with other successful stores may not be solely related to site characteristics. A site selection finding that a geographic site has high predicted sales may be a result of high advertising expenditures at the similar sites used to generate the prediction. Consequently, putting a store at that site may only be successful if the same level of advertising is used. This flaw in prior art site selection tools is a result of the inability of the prior art tools to isolate the effects of advertising so that this effect can be removed from the site selection process.
Accordingly, a need exists to provide site selection tools that are capable of making site selection analyses without the effects of advertising skewing the site selection results. The present invention solves this need by providing a method which allows for site selection without the effects of advertising so that business owners have a more accurate picture of site characteristics without the effects of advertising.